The Reliquary Engine
A twelve-week studio program — one part rigorous conceptual art education, one part metalsmithing research practice. May - July, 2026.
Built around a central question —
Can a made object function not only as a symbol of memory but as a genuine prosthetic for it?
The engine runs weekly cycles of provocation, research, material collision, and reflection, ending not just with new work but with a documented methodology I can keep running indefinitely. Drawing on the reliquary tradition, contemporary art jewelry, and my decades of practice in design systems, the goal is always the same: Create artifacts in contribution to the archaeological record.
Awesome fashion boy
Mokume-gane (by Phillip Baldwin / Shining Wave Metals), sterling silver, found tintype enamel reproduction
This locket was made for a Seattle Metals Guild memorial exhibition honoring Phillip Baldwin, a guild member and mokume-gane specialist. The exterior is fabricated from his material.
Inside, a reproduction of a tintype found on eBay with the title "Awesome Fashion Boy." The subject's name is lost. What survived is the dress, and the fact that someone, sometime, chose to wear it. The tintype carried that gesture forward. The locket continues to.
Memento mori
Mexican amber, freshwater pearl, my own hair, oxidized sterling silver, 2023. Exhibited in Bring on the Gems at SNAG x Tuscon in 2023.
When I was a teenager, I stood in front of Odilon Redon's winged heads at the Art Institute of Chicago and felt something shift. My father saw my excitement and bought me the exhibition catalog. I have returned to those images for decades.
This pendant is built from things I have carried.
The focal point is Mexican amber, carved into a coffin-like shape. I brought the material home from Chiapas, where I studied amber carving alongside traditional artists of the craft. Backing it, visible through the amber as if embedded, is a lock of my own hair — saved during college, as part of a narrative photography course that asked me to reckon with my own body and history. I kept it without knowing why, until now.
The winged figure references Redon. The pearl skull I carved myself, having never done it before — learning the task because the piece required it, as evidence of a life of perpetual study.
Memento mori means remember death. On the occasion of turning 50, I made this to remember a life in progress.
The brooch is a companion piece in the form of a craft sampler, deliberately left incomplete. Where the pendant is personal and singular, the brooch is meant to be worn by anyone. One says remember death. The other says I am still learning.
Kokeshi matchstick collection
Sterling silver, nickel silver, copper, rayon flocking, wooden matches
I collect handmade kokeshi dolls and live with them as unique figures, each containing its own form of internal character and life.
This piece began as a container. A silver and copper figure holds matches inside the body, revealed by lifing the cast finial flame atop the head.
The object was later extended into wearable forms for exhibition: a brooch and a pair of earrings. The system moves between object and body, functional and perverse, without fully resolving into either.
Superfancy necromancy
A series based on an archival image of two girls and a third figure that may or may not be present.
The work explores communication with the dead as a form of projection. The figure appears across objects: mirrored, enclosed, multiplied. The viewer becomes implicated through reflection and proximity.
The series includes a collection of miniature brass tombstones, each stamped with a phrase borrowed from casual converation, transformed into epitaph. The tombstones double as ring keeps, placing a monument to the dead on a nightstand or shelf, where it quietly enters domestic routine.
The system leaves the line open.
We must cultivate our garden
Copper, fine and sterling silver
Produced under a single-day constraint.
A carrot functions as a funnel. The form is literal and referential.
The quote is stamped along the seam, revealed through oxidation.
The object operates between instruction and absurdity.
Xolo psychopomp
Hand-carved amber, 2020
Carved in San Cristóbal de las Casas.
Amber contains suspended biological matter. The material holds time in a literal sense.
The xolo, or Mexican hairless dog, is a psychopomp in Aztec mythology, associated with the passage between worlds.
The form emerges through subtraction. The process is slow, and irreversible. The object sits between relic and figure and serves as a record of my experience studying in Mexico.
Witness piano series
Ivory keys, wooden and felt hammers, steel wire, damper spoons, ebony, sterling and fine silver, found objects
Made from our dismantled piano at Side Rail Collective. The instrument had been present in the building for decades, absorbing use and proximity without recording any of it.
This collection reassigns that role. The piano's parts, relocated to the body, suggest a history that only the material remembers.